Shattering the Consensus

Aditya Dhar’s ‘Dhurandhar’ is a formidable and technically assured spy thriller that has thoroughly unsettled India’s pro-Pakistan liberal film establishment.

With ‘Dhurandhar’, director Aditya Dhar has not merely made a successful film but has effortlessly demonstrated that cinematic authority in India no longer belongs to critics by inheritance. On the surface, Dhar’s latest film, whose worldwide gross currently stands at a staggering Rs. 710 crores, has all the classic tropes of the espionage thriller that we are used to see Hollywood and European cinema churn out for decades.

But beneath ‘Dhurandhar’s testosterone-fuelled violence and thrill-a-minute-velocity, lies something Bollywood has rarely managed: a film that is ideologically explicit without being artistically crude. That combination, rather than any single line of dialogue, explains the near-hysterical response it has provoked.

Indian cinema has seen nationalist films before. But most failed not because of their politics, but because of their incompetence. But ‘Dhurandhar’ is sleek, controlled and technically confident, unfolding over a demanding three-and-a-half hours with the assurance of a director who trusts both his material and his audience.

In doing so, it has forced a reckoning not only with Pakistan’s long war against India through terror proxies, but with the waning authority of India’s so-called ‘liberal’ critical class. For decades, India’s English-language, left-liberal film establishment has acted as a kind of cultural customs office, deciding which politics may pass as art and which must be detained as ‘vulgar propaganda.’

But ‘Dhurandhar’ defies such categorisations, and that is what has upset the pro-Pakistan reflexes of its loudest detractors. The film follows an Indian intelligence operative embedded deep within Karachi’s Lyari underworld, tracing terror-financing networks and ISI operations aimed at Indian cities. Dhar’s Karachi is not a caricature. It is dense, menacing and alive, rendered through moody cinematography, disciplined editing and sound design that fuses qawwali with rock and hip-hop into a constant thrum of unease.

Dhar’s background helps explain the confidence. He first announced himself with Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), a film that turned a contemporary military operation into a box-office juggernaut without descending into parody. Uri was patriotic, but it had respect for procedural detail.

‘Dhurandhar’ is the maturation of that instinct. What distinguishes Dhar from earlier politically assertive filmmakers is his grasp of execution. Whilst successful to a point, Vivek Agnihotri’s ‘The Kashmir Files’ tends to collapse under the weight of its own message. Its characters became mouthpieces and scenes existed to provoke outrage rather than belief. Other recent spectacles such as ‘Mission Majnu’ relied on slogans and surface nationalism, energising a base while failing to persuade sceptics. ‘Dhurandhar’ breaks decisively from this formula fatigue by embedding its message rather than bludgeoning it.

That sophistication has unnerved critics more than the film’s politics. Anupama Chopra, long regarded as a barometer of respectable English-language film criticism, dismissed the film as an “exhausting, relentless, and frenzied espionage thriller” driven by “too much testosterone, shrill nationalism, and inflammatory anti-Pakistan narratives.” After a fierce backlash against the shallowness of her critique, she quietly removed the review video.

Likewise, other objections were revealingly lazy. To criticise a spy thriller for testosterone is to miss the point of the genre. Intelligence operatives, inconveniently, tend to be men who kill for a living. Nor is it startling that a film about Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus portrays it as hostile to India. Hollywood has built entire genres around America’s enemies without being accused of hysteria. None were dismissed as propaganda.

Bollywood, by contrast, has long churned out films that blurred moral responsibility or imposed false equivalence between India and Pakistan were celebrated as nuanced and humane. ‘Fanaa’ humanised a terrorist while ‘Rang De Basanti’ romanticised violent anarchism and entered the canon.

But Dhar refuses the comforting fog that has characterised many mainstream treatments of terrorism. His film distinguishes clearly between aggressor and victim. Islamist fanatics and ISI operatives are shown as such.

The political subtext is unmistakable. Institutional paralysis during the UPA years is hinted at when intelligence warnings were ignored. But Dhar trusts the audience to draw conclusions.

That, ultimately, is what troubles India’s liberal critics. ‘Dhurandhar’ cannot be dismissed as crude or incompetent. It cannot be laughed off or ignored. By succeeding on aesthetic grounds, it exposes the shrinking monopoly of a critical class accustomed to deciding which ideologies may pass as art. The director has not merely made a successful film. He has demonstrated that cultural authority in Indian cinema no longer belongs to critics by inheritance but to those who can hold the screen, and refuse to blink.